Jutta Haeckel: Eternal Return

Inside of what Romanticism wants there already lies the seed of its failure, for at the end of the longing, the search for insight, stands the darkness of mystery. 

–Reinhard Lindenhahn

Düsseldorf-based painter Jutta Haeckel’s twenty new paintings are studies in dichotomy and ambiguity. They are representational yet abstract, both microscopic and macrocosmic, based equally in contemporary scientific theories and historic German Romanticism. Through opposing perspectives Haeckel studies “the essence of things” and our yearning for explanations.

As source material, Haeckel uses photographs of the natural world — either shot herself or appropriated — in traditional landscape format, as close-ups of details of organic material, or images taken from Google Earth. She superimposes and weaves together these disparate images using what look like the techniques of Abstract Expressionism — splashes, streaks, smears and brush strokes — but are in fact meticulously composed and constructed. These are not descriptive paintings though they look to images of nature for their inspiration. Nor are they abstract paintings, though they utilize the visual language of Abstract Expressionism.

Haeckel is intrigued by the order that can be observed in the natural world as well as the insights offered by biology and physics. But she’s even more fascinated by the limits of our perception and science’s inability to explain things. In her paintings she uses the tension between the known and uncertain to explore the deep-seated human need to create order and find meaning.

Jutta Haeckel was born in 1972 in Hanover, Germany. She studied at Hochschule fur Kunste in Bremen, Germany and Goldsmiths College in London. She has exhibited widely in Germany, including recent exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen and at Schloss Detmold. This is her fourth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.